‘They won’t tell,’ said Dagmar.
Rose had an idea; she gave Gabriel a meaning look. ‘We both know a policeman.’
‘Not his case,’ said Gabriel.
Not his case, but he was in it himself, stuck like a fly.
He had taken a phone call from Gabriel, half wishing it was Rose Hilaire, but wanting to feel loyal to Gaby. What a funny, pretty voice she had on the telephone.
‘How did you get through to me?’ he asked curiously.
‘I just kept on asking until they found you.’
‘Well, you did it.’ He was surprised all the same; he had been working on a case which, while not exactly undercover, was one demanding some secrecy. No one was supposed to know where he was operating from. Clearly they did.
‘Where are you talking from?’
‘Belmodes. Rose’s office. Where are you talking from?’ She could hear the sound of voices and laughter, even music.
‘A club. A land of a club.’ In fact it was a pub down in Deptford, down by the Surrey Docks, where he was a friend of the landlord, using his back room as a base. A side door led straight into a street. It was a safe house in a bad area at a bad time.
He was living on two levels at that time. One part of him, the professional Sergeant, soon to be Inspector, John Coffin engaged in a complicated, difficult, frustrating case which involved organized crime in dockland. It was an investigation which contrived to be both terrifying and boring at the same time. If crime could ever be boring. You got such insights into other people’s lives. Even now he had learnt that Pete Foster, the man being investigated for murder and fraud in the Docks, a hard man, was terrified of his old mother and had kept his successful career in crime hidden from her for sixteen years. She thought he was a chimney-sweep.
You learnt about yourself, too. He was always learning.
Last night he had discovered something about himself, and, as it happened, something about Rose Hilaire. He moved his shoulder experimentally; still sore. That had been part of the learning process.
After midnight, taking his careful, indirect route home from his dockside rendezvous, he had met two men. One had slipped out of an alley in front of him; he saw the glint of a knife. Then a blow hit his shoulder, felling him to the ground. Stay in character, he told himself. Stay in character. Three months had gone in establishing his pseudo-self as a friendless, cowardly drunk. He remembered giving a high scream: he was not proud of that noise, he hadn’t thought he had it in him, but it had come out easily. His face had gone into something soft that his nose told him was dog dirt. A hand pushed him further into the dirt; a voice had said: ‘Just listen; you don’t know me, but I know you.’ To his surprise, it was a woman’s voice. ‘I know you want Pete Foster, we’ll do a trade. I’ll give you Foster if you get Joe Landau for me.’ Coffin must have moved because the pressure on him increased. ‘You’ll do him for me because I ask and because he’s a lousy, rotten drug-pusher. I’ve got family reasons for hating him. He’s corrupted someone I care for.’ He had sat up then, and they had negotiated. He had not seen her face, which she kept covered with a scarf, but he thought he could put a name to her. At the end of a few minutes, he had agreed to get Landau, and she had come up with the names of banks and accounts for both Foster and Landau, and the place where he could lay hands on Pete Foster. As he had finally got back to Mrs Lorimer’s and was washing his face, he was wondering how much of the dirty water of the drug scene had washed over Rose and Steve. He thought it had done.
That was one John Coffin, perhaps the better man of the two.
The other Coffin, the owner of the house in Mouncy Street, the almost-lover of two ladies, Gabriel and Rose, was living with greater intensity, even if only part-time.
This part-timer worked, as part-timers will do, with devotion. Thinking all the deeper for not being able to concentrate full time on the bodies in Mouncy Street. Three of them now, all adolescent boys.
He did not as yet know all the details of how they had died, and what had gone before, but rumour had it that no great physical strength had been involved so that you could not rule out a woman as the killer.
Or a child.
Or a puny man who would kill but did not choose to use too much force.
Rumours had it also that there had been a little bit of nasty business first. Sex-play plus torture. So you were looking for a psycho. A bit of a sadist, maybe with a touch of masochism thrown in too.
Because the other bit of rumour, and not passed on by his friend Jordan, none of it was, said that with one of the victims, the last, as yet not formally identified as Ephraim Humphreys, a teddy-bear had been found. This Teddy, so the tale went, had had one paw removed and a small flail with leather tails sewn on. A nasty little toy, if toy it was, and the rumour was true. You could make what you liked of it.
All this, part rumour, part no doubt fact, was at the back of his mind as he spoke to Gabriel.
‘So what do you want?’
Help, she told him, and most of all they wanted, needed, to know exactly what was going on.
The other Coffin surfaced briefly. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ After all, it was a case and he was a policeman. ‘I’m a bit short of time.’
‘We need to know what they are looking for. Or even whom.’ She could hear the rumble of conversation in the background. ‘I’m surprised you don’t want to find out for yourself.’
‘All right.’ He pushed a door with his foot, the noises ceased. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ A man came through the door. ‘I’ll try to find time.’
‘Sir, we’ve got him.’ He could not keep the triumph out of his voice. He was a young man with dark hair and bright eyes. ‘Parked his car round the corner and walked straight into our arms.’ He was wearing jeans with a dirty sweater and thought no one would know he was a policeman. ‘He knew we were watching his mother, but he did not know his wife had told us where he’d hidden her.’
‘Good. Thank God for family quarrels.’
With a prayer for the child corrupted. It had to be a child, Coffin thought, and hadn’t Mrs Foster been Gilly Slee when he had known her at Hook Road School?
Thus began the last chapter of a case that had started as a simple bank robbery, then extended into one of murder and fraud, and drugs.
‘So he’s on his way to Greenwich?’
‘Yes. We packed him off straight away. Brown and Gilmour are with him.’
‘Fine. You go on too. I’ll follow. I’ve got one or two telephone calls to make. And, one other thing.’ The young detective turned round, bright-eyed, expectant. ‘Don’t call me Sir. Anything else, even nothing, but not that.’
After a certain amount of ringing around, he got Phil Jordan. They had never been close friends but they had got on well; lately, however, a gap had opened.
He had his own share of responsibility to bear for this. Policemen are not usually intellectuals and have as a rule a distrust of them as animals of a different breed. John Coffin’s historical researches into his ancestors had caught Jordan’s attention. Perhaps another factor was the ever-rising star of Commander Dander, old friend and ally of Coffin and now his influential patron. Jordan had no patron, only a father-in-law.
‘What’s the news about Mouncy Street, Phil?’ He kept his voice mildly curious.
‘Oh, this and that,’ said Jordan. ‘Things keep turning up.’
‘So I hear.’
‘Oh yes. Don’t believe all the tales.’
‘Who does? What about meeting for a drink?’
This case was full of odds and ends that didn’t fit together. If he could get Jordan talking, he might get something out of him.
Jordan demurred. ‘Pretty busy. You know how it is.’ He paused. ‘Hear you’ve got great things going on over there.’
‘All wound up. As of today. What about that drink, Phil?’
‘Let me see.’ Coffin could hear Jordan speak to someone else in the room. He came back. ‘Yes, why not? I think I
can get away.’
Permission received, thought Coffin. He’s going to be allowed to talk to me.
‘The Red Anchor, then? In about an hour?’
This would give him time to get back to Mrs Lorimer’s, out of his jeans and grubby shirt, and into something that smelt less heavily of the smoke, sweat and beer of the Prince of Wales where he had spent most of the last few working days. Even a week of sitting there, supping in the beer by a kind of osmosis through the atmosphere, and eating solid sandwiches, seemed to have deposited a tiny roll of fat round his waist. It could not be true that nervous strain made you lose weight.
In the Red Anchor, he found a quiet seat in a corner. Phil Jordan arrived just behind him.
‘Nice evening.’ He was prepared to be jovial, setting the scene for their meeting. It made Coffin feel uneasy. ‘You still at Ma Lorimer’s? I had a room there once. Heard she’d gone a bit funny.’
‘No.’ Coffin wouldn’t hear anything adverse about his landlady. ‘Sound as a bell.’
‘Not what I heard. I heard she took a chicken in the basket to the vet and put the cat in the oven.’
‘Anyone might do that.’ In fact the chicken had been alive but sick, and the cat had got into the oven of his own accord after a bit of baked fish. And got out again pretty smartly. ‘That is, she knew what she was doing.’
‘I wish I did,’ said Phil Jordan, relapsing into his usual gloom.
‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘I think we’re up the creek.’ He had dropped the joviality, even dropped as well the slightly secretive air of one who had been given permission to tell, but not all. ‘We have what you might call circles of evidence. The thing is that they do not seem to touch. The first circle is the bodies. We have IDs for them all.’
Coffin nodded. ‘And they are all about the same age and they are all boys who have never been in trouble with the police, but the people who taught them and their family were not exactly surprised at what happened.’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘They had to be like that.’ Anyway, he knew Steve Hilaire, and he could reach the picture through him. Not that Steve was dead.
‘You’ve got it right,’ admitted Jordan ungrudgingly. Peter Ellis, Mark Lawrence – he was the one dressed up in Mosse’s clothes – and Ephraim Humphreys. At least we know their names. What we don’t know is what they had in common that made them end up where they did.’
‘Except their sex and age.’
‘Yes, except those two things.’
‘And they were all three killed not long after they disappeared.’
‘That’s just a guess.’
‘Of course it is. But it’s what I’d expect. You can’t keep a young boy hidden for long. Not alive anyway.’
‘Well, you’re right. But we have not been able to discover any contact they had in common.’
‘Although it must be there.’
‘Unless we think of three different murderers using the same spot.’
‘Like Timothy Evans and Christie?’
‘Not acceptable. So we’re looking for one person. And one place. One place where the boys went, then were killed.’ He looked at Coffin. ‘We’re thinking of your house in Mouncy Street.’
‘It was Ted Mosse’s first.’
‘And then Rose Hilaire’s.’
Coffin felt an immediate need to protect Rose Hilaire. ‘I’ve heard tales about old Mosse: how he let anyone and everyone in. How it was called The Mad House.’
‘Yes. I know that; we’ve heard it, too. There were complaints from the neighbours to the police at that time about the goings-on. We have them on record. There was nothing we could do. After Mosse died, things seemed to have quietened down. But it looks as though the house went on being used as a rendezvous till you bought it. I think Rose Hilaire knew. We’ll get it out of her.’
‘Well, that’s a circle and a half. What’s your other one and a half?’
‘We won’t pursue the simile, it doesn’t work.’ He got up to get them some more beer. ‘We’re up the creek because we don’t know where to go from here.’
‘Is that what you’ve been told to tell me, or is it the truth?’
‘You can check.’
‘I might just do that.’
Jordan said uneasily, ‘You know how it is these days, we’re getting so scientific. Team-work, and all that. We use what the forensics give us. More and more.’ He sighed. ‘I like it. It’s right, but not what I thought when I started.’
‘You thought you’d be Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Yes. No. Sort of.’
Coffin smiled. ‘When I started out I met a kid who was going to be a detective. More Sexton Blake he had in mind, I think.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Haven’t seen him for years,’ said Coffin regretfully. ‘But I heard he was making a fortune flogging antiques in Los Angeles.’ He looked at Jordan. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Witnesses. We haven’t managed to flush up one person who saw the boys go into the house, or even very near it. We can’t place them there. We can’t place anyone there.’
‘No?’
‘Except you occasionally.’
‘And the people who surveyed the house for the mortgage and the workmen I engaged,’ Coffin reminded him.
‘Except them. And if we could get anything else on any of them we would.’
‘So they’re all non-people?’
‘As far as we’re concerned they don’t exist.’
They did exist though, they were men with bodies, energies, lusts.
‘I shouldn’t write them right off.’
‘No. Nor the neighbours, nor the postman and the milkman, nor the shopkeepers in the run of shops round the corner. They have backs into those gardens. In theory they are there. But they are very low down in our lists. Like you.’
‘Thank you.’ He hoped it was so.
‘Because no witnesses. No direct evidence. All we have is Charley who makes a living doing photography, and a pretty successful living it looks too, who said he’s almost sure he saw a boy, can’t say whom, standing at the gate of your house one evening about three weeks or so ago. Could have been Ephraim.’
‘What was Charlie doing?’
‘Taking photographs.’
‘Pity he didn’t take that one.’
‘And then we have an old lady, more or less an invalid so she never goes out, who thinks she saw someone climbing over the garden fence one night. She called her son, he’s the chemist, but he couldn’t see anyone.’
‘Does seem a load of nothing. But it’s always the way. Then something cracks open and you have a case.’
Or you didn’t; he had to admit that was the way too.
‘I can see why you want the forensic boys on it,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘Yes. And what they have told us is that the first body was too far decomposed to be very helpful. He went in about twelve months ago. But it looks as if he was strangled, might have been drugged. Some evidence of having been beaten before death and probably sexually assaulted.’
‘That was the body dressed up in Mosse’s clothes?’
‘Yes. They were just wrapped around him. Then the second body – in time, that is; the one found first because it was on top – had also been strangled, and possibly sexually assaulted. Traces of drugs. Both of these lads had bits and pieces on their clothes and bodies that placed them as killed in the house where they were buried. Probably in the same room where they were found.’
Coffin waited.
‘It’s the third body, the one in your garden, that’s got more to say for itself.’
‘That’s the boy, Ephraim?’
‘He seems to have been moved around. This is what they say: they think he was stabbed in one place – tiny flecks of polished wood on the body. Then he was placed while still alive and bleeding somewhere else. They think that it was an enclosed place, a cupboard, or under floorboards. Either in t
he building where he was killed or elsewhere!’
The cupboard at Belmodes, thought Coffin at once. ‘How do they know?’
‘Mouse droppings,’ said Phil Jordan succinctly. ‘And that means he was in a house or somewhere of human usage. The mouse lives with us, you know.’
Belmodes was probably alive with mice.
‘As well as the mouse droppings there was a dead housefly caught up in the clothing. And a slug had left a trail across one leg.’
Now he remembered that Phil Jordan had always transmitted unpleasant details in this lugubrious yet informative way. He was doing it now.
Slugs as well as mice at Belmodes, probably. No doubt an acute team of forensic scientists, skilled in the right disciplines, could distinguish between the mice and slugs of Belmodes and those of Mouncy Street and Rose Hilaire’s pad. So that was what the search was all about.
‘Then the body was moved again to where it was buried.’
‘In the garden of my house.’ He thought about it. ‘Seems a lot of moving around?’
‘There would be a reason for it. The place where the killing took place is being visited. Or something like that.’
‘Or someone moving in.’
‘Or someone moving in. Or there are workmen arriving.’ He amplified it. ‘For some reason as yet unknown, the place got dangerous and the body had to be hidden until it could be buried.’
Coffin had been thinking. ‘All this activity does not have to have taken place under one roof?’
He was thinking of the places under review: Belmodes, his house in Mouncy Street, Rose Hilaire’s flat. All, or a mixture of all three places, were suspect.
Jordan shrugged. ‘If you put it like that, no. This is what we have to establish.’
‘So that’s what the search is about?’ Little bits of this and scraps of that, and Ephraim’s bits of wood, flakes of paint, animal excretions from the three establishments named, were going to be gathered and matched against similar scraps found on the three bodies. Then with any luck the investigating team would have some circumstantial evidence to go upon.
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